by Gwenda Bond
“Oz,” I prompt. “What does it mean?”
“It means she’s probably had a hard time of it, on her own,” he says. “They do better in groups, when they can share the visions. The Pythias, they’re–”
“Oz saw them, yesterday. I never have,” Justin puts in.
“Then let him finish,” Tam says.
I don’t know if Tam’s working on some problem with Justin beyond his general dislike of operatives or not, but I also couldn’t care less at the moment. What Oz is saying matters to me.
“What were you going to say?” I ask. “Did they say anything about her? My mom?”
Oz stares into the distance at the tops of the Houses visible over the crazy forest. “They sent me to you. They were looking out for you, because of her.”
I gaze out over that same horizon, though I hardly see it. My thoughts are on my mom and our past. “That’s funny,” I say.
I don’t explain what I mean. They’ll see soon enough.
“They also refused to tell Bronson where your dad was,” Oz says. “They said your mom wouldn’t want them to.”
“What if he isn’t guilty?” I ask. “What would you do then?”
Oz frowns as if he’s not sure what I’m asking. Justin says, “We would do whatever we were told. That’s the way the organization works. Your dad would have agreed, before he went rogue.”
“So there’s nothing that could convince you not to do something they told you? You follow orders, no matter what.” I’m genuinely curious.
“Hypotheticals are meaningless,” Justin says, “without specifics. Your father hasn’t claimed to be motivated by any noble cause.”
But he had – not specifically, but he asked me to trust him, claimed that he’s doing the right thing. Tam and Bree exchange a look with me, and I give a slight shake of my head. I’m not confiding that in these boys. I wanted to see if they would be open to a truth different than the one they’re told to believe. The answer seems to be no. For Justin, anyway.
“About treason,” I say. “What’s the penalty?”
There’s an uncomfortable silence. Justin obviously knows – at this point it’s clear he knows just about everything, off the top of his head. But it’s Oz who answers. “It hasn’t been levied yet.”
“But you know what it is. So tell me,” I say.
“It’s death,” he says, with regret.
I drop my arm from where it’s linked with his. I can’t bear to be touching him – or anyone – with that word echoing in my head. Instead, I speed up. The sooner we get out of here, the sooner I can find out what the future holds.
When we pass the turnoff to Set House twenty minutes later, I brush my cheek at the memory of the Egyptian hench-god’s cold touch and check to see if Anzu’s still above us. He is and, if I’m right, he lowers his flight path so he’s nearer. But his protection skills aren’t put to the test, and neither are Oz and Justin’s.
We don’t meet a soul on the path as we make our way out, and we don’t talk much either. Dark continues to descend by degrees. Oz and Justin acknowledged that it’s better if we’re out of here before night falls. The only people who make a habit of visiting the Houses of the Gods then are other gods, and that alone is reason enough to hurry.
We reach the grand sprawl of the mansion that serves as the loghouse as dark takes hold. I pretend the calls that start up behind us in the forest and overgrown greenery aren’t happening. It was bad enough in there during the daylight. I’d rather not consider what might have been sleeping.
There are a couple of Society guards posted at the main loghouse, sitting at their posts as we enter a long tiled and windowed salon. They salute Oz and Justin, rake their eyes over the rest of us in disbelief. “I just want to wash my face,” I say.
Before they can argue, Oz moves in to talk quietly with them. Their respect for their fellow operatives – and maybe for my grandfather – gets us leave to use the loghouse bathroom to scrub our faces and arms clean. It’s not vanity. I don’t want to give my mother any reason to be more thrown than seeing my regular unadorned face will make her. That’s always been enough.
Tam heads into the men’s room, leaving me and Bree alone in this small wallpapered one that’s been converted for visitors by the addition of stall doors and two polished white sinks. I meet her eyes in the mirror. The one degree of remove makes it easier than actually facing her.
“I am sorry I never told you. I wanted to. So many times, I almost did.”
Her attention stays on me in the mirror. “I don’t doubt it, K. I really don’t. That you were sorry that time you drew on my face? That I doubt.” Her voice is artificially breezy, but I think she means it. She waves me in front of her, having freed the small make-up case she brought along from my backpack. “At least let me freshen you up for your mom. Do you see her much?”
I shake my head.
“Not ready to talk about that yet?”
“I guess not,” I say. “You going to take it out on my face?”
“No,” she says. “Not this time.”
I scoot up onto the sink, perching there and hunching so my face is easy for her to reach.
“You’ll have to soon enough, you know,” she says. “And you’ll find out nothing terrible happens. I’m not going to judge you based on her.”
“I won’t blame you.” Because I can’t imagine how anyone couldn’t. Whose mother feels about them the way mine does about me?
“Maybe a little, but we’ll still be friends. That’s a promise.”
I consent to let her comb my tangles, and swipe some neutral shadow over my eyelids. I even hold still while she applies heavy liner that tilts up at the end. Bree offers me a lipstick tube and starts on her own makeup, twice as elaborate as anything I wear. I hop down and smooth the red over my lips. “Better,” she says, “right?”
Undeniably. I put on my leather jacket, and feel almost ready for what’s ahead. Mom. I don’t rush Bree.
Sure, we’re killing time. I know we are. But it comforts us both, this chance to take a breath – and not of water. This is the same thing we do when we’re going out to the market or planning to try and sneak into a club. Sometimes before school. Here and now, it’s hard to believe we’ll ever do those things again.
When we emerge, Oz is talking to the guard again. He glances over and doesn’t look away as he watches us cross the room.
“Tell me we don’t still look like crazy messes?” I ask.
“You never did,” he says.
Bree says, “Good try.”
I point out, “We were coated in sand yesterday, and painted into hippies today. This is the first time you’ve ever seen what we look like.”
He hesitates. “You look nice,” he says.
Bree and I laugh.
“What?” Oz asks.
“We always say anyone who tells us we look nice is off the list,” I explain. “No girl is ever trying to look nice.”
“Well,” Bree says, “some of them probably are. Just not us.”
I expect Oz to be embarrassed by this, but instead he leans in. Solemnly, he says, “You look bad, then. Very, very bad.”
Bree drops her wrist, a parody of southern belle flirting. “Don’t you say the nicest things?”
Oz smiles. I can’t help but catch it and return one.
“Ready?” Tam asks, as he and Justin come back out, apparently not noticing the effort we put into our appearance. Justin, however, might be admiring Bree. Surreptitiously. If he is, this is something that I approve of. She deserves admiration.
In answer to Tam, I say, “For whatever’s next.” I mean it not even a little.
There’s a big black Society coach waiting for us on the street when we get outside. Oz unlatches the coach door and holds it open for me, like a knight in some fairy tale.
I remind myself that Oz is not on my side. But he might not be entirely on the opposite one.
We rattle our way toward the Circle, and I assume Anzu
drifts above the carriage like the world’s most fearsome kite. The carriage slows when we hit the neighborhood’s heavily trafficked outskirts, and we decide to go the rest of the way on foot.
Tall buildings wear tattered remnants of bright paint, and lush green trees dot the sidewalk. The street is wide, with plenty of other people traveling the same way on business of their own. Every third streetlight or so works, and a few trash can blazes help… if not so much with lighting, then with conjuring a dangerous ambience.
Here’s what I couldn’t say to Bree.
I see Mom at least once a week. I wait across the street from the market, hoping to catch sight of her. On those rare occasions when I can catch her working a table, I quietly observe from a distance. I sneak, because Dad doesn’t approve. I’m not supposed to approach her. Dad has tried to explain that her reaction to me has nothing to do with me, that it’s part of the vision-brought madness that took her over after the Awakening, the thing that led her to leave us and live here in the first place. Logically, I understand he’s probably right. For the most part.
But I’m also the only person who sets her off by existing. I make her worse. That’s a fact. So I haven’t spoken to my mom in over a year, and that last time was a mistake. She saw me when she shouldn’t have. It destroyed her equilibrium. Dad yelled at me afterward.
It was a bad scene, which sent me back to hovering at the edge of her life. Dad brings bags filled with each week’s crop of subsidy groceries to whatever squat she’s living in, takes her to the doctor when she needs it, helps keep her semi-stable. Unlike Bree’s absentee dad, I always get a birthday card from her. Dad brings it to her, has her sign, leaves it under my bedroom door. I have all five of them in a drawer in my room. I look at them an embarrassing amount.
These are the things I can’t bring myself to say out loud.
The street opens up on the abandoned traffic roundabout and circular park that gave first Dupont Circle and now Oracle Circle their names.
“What now?” Oz asks.
Bree examines the crush in front of us. “Do you know where she’ll be?”
I, too, take in the throng of people in the tree-covered space. Stalls and tents and tables are arranged one after the other in a jumble of noise. Candles and strings of fairy lights illuminate the market, which I’ve never seen at night. Besides fortunes, people come here to get charms to stave off the evil eye, amulets to hide someone from the attention of the gods. The effects are probably make-believe, but I wouldn’t say no to one of each to loop around my neck, pin to my sleeve, hide in my pocket.
This isn’t normally the time that I come here, but given the brisk trade I assume she’ll be working. Dad being in custody means I don’t have to be sneaky. Not this time. He’s not around to yell at me.
“I guess we’ll have to look around,” I say. “Ask if anyone knows where she is?”
“OK,” Bree says. “What’s her name?”
Oz answers, “Hannah Locke.”
I nod.
Tam finally speaks. “We’ll split up and ask for Hannah, then.”
“You split up,” Bree says, and ignores Tam’s hurt look. “If you get a lead, then come find us. Otherwise, we’ll meet you guys at the fountain in the middle in twenty minutes.”
“I don’t know–” Oz says.
But Bree shakes her head. “Twenty minutes.”
It’s hard to argue with Bree when she’s in command mode. Spending chunks of her childhood in a TV studio has given her a well-developed talent for bossiness. I can’t help smiling at her as the boys head into the mix together. Tam isn’t the only one scowling.
“Thanks,” I say, “for not bolting or abandoning me. You may regret it, though.”
Bree dips her head in acknowledgment. “I figured you might not want them there… if we find her first,” she says. “Now, come on.”
We walk toward the market. “How’d you know about the fountain? Have you been here before?”
“Once. Remember Mark?”
I do. He was one of her mother’s boyfriends.
“He thought I’d love to get my fortune told for a birthday present. I was thirteen.”
The pavement beneath our feet is cracked, and I go wide to avoid the worst of the split. “Did you love it?”
“A creepy lady told me I was going to die alone,” Bree says. “Not the best birthday fortune ever.”
“That sucks. Con artist.”
“Mark was a tool. I think she did it to make him look bad. It worked. Mom dumped him. I have no issues with oracles.”
A bent woman stands at the edge of the market stalls. Her arm crooks, urging people inside. I suspect her stoop is for effect. The hat at her feet overflows with bills.
Now that we’re closer, the tall fountain at the center is visible. It spews water from a bowl lifted by three carved beauties. The city leaves it on so the oracles will have a ready source of clean water. Something about the Circle feels different tonight, and I don’t think it’s the time of day or my nerves. I never come here calm.
The Society’s position on street oracles is that the average person can’t wield relics with such skill and so they’re not legit. Dad has always disagreed and claimed that an innate gift and a found relic – even a rock with the tiniest smidgen of divine energy – is enough to give people visions of something real. He doesn’t want me to think of Mom as a phony. I assume most of the oracles are charlatans, a few genuine. I’ve never been sure about Mom, but she believes she’s one of the few. If she was an oracle of Delphi, I guess she’s right.
An old woman at one table shakes a teacup in her hand, reading the leaves for a tourist on break from the revels. The woman beams, happy with her fate. I don’t want to interrupt, so I wait until we reach two women who are clearly mother and daughter, with painted Tarot decks laid on their table. They beckon me forward.
“Hannah Locke?” I ask. “Do you know where she is?”
“If you’re not buying, get out of here,” the mother says, and the daughter cackles.
“Charming,” I say.
We move on. The next stall houses two Yoruba diviners at a low table. A small shrine to Legba sits at the back of the tent, a cane wound with green beads propped against it. The women consult with a client in a Hawaiian shirt, leaning over a round tray where a handful of the small brown nuts they use for divination form a pattern.
Bree notes my pause. “Here?”
“No,” I say.
One of the women tilts her head at me in what might be recognition. The tray with the nuts has a face impressed on the rich brown wood. A bloodless imitation of Legba’s.
The woman shrugs one shoulder and reaches out to gather the nuts. She rattles them in her palm and tosses them again. We keep going.
“Hey, did you and Tam say anything about Legba showing up yesterday?”
Bree thinks for a moment. “No. They never really asked. Did you?”
I shake my head no. “And I don’t think we should in front of them.”
“Wonder what he wants with you,” she says.
“He’s destined to be disappointed, whatever it is. But I’d rather keep any info we have that they don’t, just in case.”
“He could be the one, you know,” Bree says.
I don’t know who she means for a moment, until she says, “Your dad. The one who beats the odds. Who gets off clean.”
“He has to.” But I feel less sure than I sound. He’s not even fighting for his freedom, but I’m going to win it somehow? The unlikelihood isn’t going to stop me from trying.
A pale woman in a flowing white top and a crimson headdress catches my eye. She sits beneath a small tent, a lone card chair beside her. She holds a bowl in her lap, and water laps the sides. But so does fire. Or maybe that’s a trick, some reflection on the water. Whichever, her fingers stroke the fire in the bowl, pulling it through the air like taffy.
She smiles at me. Her hand hovers over the bowl, and flames cling to her skin as she wave
s to us.
“Let’s go,” Bree whispers.
But I’m not sure. “Wait.”
The woman keeps smiling. “She is waiting for you. Next street over, fourth door. The red one.”
Of course Mom knows I’m coming. She’s an oracle. Maybe this message means she isn’t going to turn me away. I dig in my backpack for a large-ish bill, place it on the ground beside the oracle. “For your trouble.”
“Be careful, girl,” the woman says, her hands dipping back into the water, the fire dying. The thin coating of liquid on her skin that allows the trick is visible with the flame extinguished. She picks up the money. “Secrets are like wolves. They have sharp teeth.”
Bree steers me away. “She’s probably just messing with you.”
I don’t respond.
The boys are waiting for us at the fountain, not talking, with their backs to the naked stone goddesses. Leery children with smudged cheeks race around them. I’d bet anything they’re thinking, Should we try to jump these guys or just pick their pockets?
“We struck out. You guys have better luck?” Tam asks.
“Think so,” I say, hooking my thumb in the direction of the street that burning-hands lady told us. “Sounds like one of her regular spots.”
“Let’s get going then,” Tam says.
I start to shake my head, but Bree holds up her hand. “I’m going to save us an awkward conversation. We’re walking you there, but we’ll wait outside.”
Acceptable. I nod, but I should prepare them. “She may not let me come in.”
“I bet she does,” Oz says.
I shrug a shoulder. In mutual silent agreement, we head toward the street. Usually people try to sell charms or predictions nonstop, but there are no interruptions on our way. At the corner, we can see the buildings ahead. They’re rundown, mainly squats, because who wants to live in the middle of Oracle Circle otherwise? But this was pricey territory once upon a time.
Graffiti is everywhere, but not the same type as in other parts of town. An ankh sprayed on a two-story townhouse marks it as a place for Egyptian divination, three slashing runes for the Norse on the blue house next door, a knotted symbol for the Celts on red brick, blocky Aztec symbols on the front of a dirty cream apartment building. The graffiti here is advertising.